Burn pit exposure cuts Poquoson soldier's career short

POQUOSON — — Before he got sick, before the tremors, memory lapses and surgeries, Chief Warrant Officer Jeff Lamprecht guarded his buddies from an Apache attack helicopter, with Hellfire missiles at his fingertips.

The 40-year-old Poquoson native completed four combat deployments from 2003 to 2010: three to Iraq and one to Afghanistan.

He'd go back tomorrow if he could.

The narrow front seat of the lethal gunship was his second home, surrounded by laser range finders and target designators, a video monitor near his lap, a side-mounted helmet camera that offered a view similar to a two-way mirror.

That kind of multitasking and razor-sharp communication would be impossible today. Lamprecht can't feel much below his knees, and the simple act of standing up can make him dizzy.

"Sometimes my feet don't do what I want them to," he said. "I'll stammer my tongue. I know what I want to say, but my tongue just vapor-locks and I won't make the word."

He can't blame the Taliban or al-Qaida, and it wasn't battle stress or nerves.

His worst enemy turned out to be burning garbage.

Multiple tours, untold fallout

Throughout his tours, Lamprecht was stationed next to burn pits that the military employed to dispose of everything from human feces to batteries to computer hardware. His second tour was at Balad Air Base, Iraq. His third was at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit, Iraq.

Hundreds of personnel say they have been sickened by toxic fumes and debris from these pits, and Lamprecht is pretty sure he's one of them.

"There was particulate matter," he said. "There was invisible dust falling from the sky, and it was in our skin and in our water, and we're bathing in it. And then it's in our food. We brushed our teeth with it. We washed our hair with it. I mean, we lived in that filth."

On Thursday, President Barack Obama signed into law a wide-ranging veterans bill that includes the creation of a registry for burn pit victims. It will create a list similar to the Agent Orange and Gulf War registries to help patients, doctors and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs determine to what extent air pollution caused by open air burn pits has led to health problems.

So far, he has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which is characterized by long-term pain throughout the body, including the joints and muscles. He also has isolated nerve damage associated with neuropathy. He has bouts of tremors because of Parkinson's-like symptoms.

Now stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., he has begun the process of medically retiring from the Army. No longer able to fly an aircraft, he is pursuing an aeronautics degree in hopes of landing a ground job with a medevac company.

Because he loved the Army, because his father and grandfather were combat aviators before him, Lamprecht stuck it out as long as he could. His wife, Donna, teaches at a community college at Fort Campbell and is attuned to Army culture. She understood how her husband felt.

"The soldier's mentality is to push through," she said, "so he would continue to go back and fight."

Jeff acknowledged he didn't tell his doctors everything. The following passage is from a journal he kept to document his many health problems. It was written as he reflected on his many years of service.

"The simple fact of the matter is that I save lives. This is not to say I am a war lover, for that cannot be further from the truth . . . I am the penultimate sheepdog, hunting the horrible things that go bump in the night. To keep doing that, I hid most of these things from the doctors over the years to keep my deployment and flight status. But now, I am done."

The prospect of developing Parkinson's Disease is probably what worries him the most. Death would be preferable to dementia.

"Put me in the ground," he said. "Don't worry. I'll be in there with good people. But to lose my mind, and worse, to have my children watch . . . that's what bothers me."

Military's evolving rules

The scope of burn pits and the number of military personnel potentially affected were partially documented in an August 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office. It recommended improvements in how the U.S. handled solid waste disposal in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The GAO found it was difficult to determine the number of burn pits at any given time. Virtually every military installation used them, but the number has fluctuated as the U.S. has pivoted from Iraq to Afghanistan, the GAO said.

In November 2009, Afghanistan had 50 burn pits. That rose to 184 in April 2010 and 251 in August that year. By comparison, Iraq had 67 burn pits in November 2009, then 52 in April 2010 and only 22 in August, according to the report.